Resources

On May 19th and 20th, the 15th Annual Philadelphia Premier CIO Forum welcomed attendees from across the region with a dynamic agenda of up-to-the-minute topics and exciting speakers who shared their expertise. The Premier CIO forum included powerful keynotes, informative breakouts and discussions with subject matter experts and cutting-edge solution providers.

SDI’s CIO, Ron Fijalkowski, who recently published an editorial piece in CIO applications magazine about master data management, was a panelist on the breakout session titled: Office 365 Implementation, Lessons Learned. Microsoft Office 365 is a cloud-based version of the traditional Office software that is perceived to have a wide range of advantages to business customers.

The panel discussion - which was moderated by George Sullivan from Delaware County Community College and included Chris Shull from Tatum, Syd Weinstein from People Metrics and John DeSantis from Pennrose in addition to Ron Fijalkowski – put experts on the hot seat to review their experience migrating to Office 365. They covered why they transitioned, what the perceived advantages are and what lessons they learned.

With the exploding interest in the Internet of Things (IoT), the discussion of Microsoft’s cloud-based solution was well received. Cloud-based services have substantially grown over the past few years with Amazon, SAP, Salesforce.com and Microsoft taking the lead. We’re also seeing purpose-built clouds – supply chain management systems, work order management systems among others - all working in the cloud, connecting to other clouds. The IoT requires the cloud to work and it’s evolving to better serve the IoT and the end users.

Data standardization is part of Google’s new initiative to help people find relevant datasets. With a recent study from Data Science Central, it’s estimated that data scientists spend 60% of their time preparing data for analysis, rather than performing the analysis itself. Therefore, the goal of this schema is to drive standardization so that more time can be spent analyzing it.